Dreamforce 2026 recap: Salesforce moves the CRM into Claude and Slack

Dreamforce keynotes follow a script. A Salesforce executive drives a demo that looks finished, and back home your admin quietly adds two quarters to the roadmap.

At Dreamforce 2026 (Sept. 15-17, San Francisco and Salesforce+), Salesforce aimed a sharper message at anyone who owns a number: it wants your reps working in Claude and Slack, with Salesforce supplying the data, workflows, permissions and governance underneath. The company teed that up in a pre-show Slackforce post, quoting a line co-founder Parker Harris used earlier in the year.

You may never log in to Salesforce again.

AIforce and its surfaces

AIforce is Salesforce’s name for a live interface layer that brings the full platform to wherever people and agents work, with the Headless Toolkit underneath, an open architecture that exposes every element of the Salesforce platform. The privacy pitch is Zero Data Retention. Salesforce says partner models use business data to answer the question at hand and do not keep it.

• Claudeforce, the Anthropic partnership. Salesforce in Claude comes with 37 prebuilt sales skills, from daily briefings to deal strategy, and Salesforce says it opened to all customers in beta after pilots at Deloitte, GitLab and Legora. More skills are due in late 2026.
• Slackforce, the conversational Salesforce interface inside Slack. Its Surfaces feature, available now on Free, Pro, Business+, Enterprise+ and Legacy plans with Slackbot enabled, turns a plain-language request into a dashboard, report or deck. Live data begins rolling out in October.
• Agentforce Coworker, the assistant inside Lightning, is generally available. Salesforce says 100,000 users activated it within its first 35 days.
• The Salesforce Development plug-in for Claude Code brings more than 40 skills to the engineers who build on the platform.

The agents have names now

Salesforce gave its agents first names and job titles, and two of them work for sales. Hunter, the outbound agent, learns from your Salesforce CRM data, customer conversations, enablement content and seller activity patterns, then works from prospecting through proposals and forecasting. It can pull ZoomInfo, Demandbase or Apollo data through Salesforce’s Data Vendor Gateway, works in Slack, Teams and Claude, and can require rep approval before outreach or a proposal reaches a customer. Hunter runs on a long-horizon runtime that keeps a goal alive across extended timeframes, and it stays in pilot until a GA planned for November.

Piper, the inbound agent, is Qualified’s AI SDR: it talks to website visitors by chat, voice or video and routes the qualified ones to a rep. Salesforce finished acquiring Qualified on April 1, 2026. Fin, the customer agent, arrived with Salesforce’s Sept. 10 acquisition of Fin, the company formerly called Intercom, and its base of more than 30,000 companies. Salesforce lists Piper, Fin and four more agents as generally available now: customer service (Casey), IT and HR (Paige), commerce (Carter) and supply chain (Marshall).

Salesforce’s own Dreamforce recap says early customer Fulton Bank used Hunter to set revenue goals, such as reengaging $340,000 of at-risk pipeline, and to draft outreach in each seller’s voice. That $340,000 is the goal. Salesforce also says Hunter builds 60% of Perk’s sales pipeline, with no pipeline total or time frame attached. When your AE brings up either number, ask for the result and the denominator.

That test predates Hunter and this year’s models. The drop from one turn to many still matters, because a long-running agent works across many turns by design. Agree on the baseline before Hunter touches live pipeline: meetings booked, pipeline created, drafts your reps rewrite and actions they reject.

Koa and the governance plumbing

Koa is Salesforce’s first CRM reasoning model, post-trained on NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super with synthetic CRM scenarios from more than 14 industries and no customer data. Salesforce says it matched or beat leading models with three times fewer errors on the company’s own CRM benchmark and was 11% more precise at calling the right action than today’s default general intelligence models. It is in pilot now, with U.S. GA expected in winter 2026.

Constellation Research’s Larry Dignan placed the Nemotron choice in a wider pattern of software vendors using open models to keep AI costs in check and get better accuracy. If you get into the pilot, put Koa on one agent that writes to opportunity records and count its wrong actions against the model you run today.

The Trusted Enterprise AI Harness groups six capabilities (models, context, agency, actions, governance and security) under an AI control plane that Salesforce says will discover, manage, evaluate and cost-govern agents across the enterprise stack. Salesforce Ben’s Mariel Domingo read the Harness as Salesforce naming the architecture it has been building toward, with nothing new to switch on. Salesforce plans to begin rolling out the new capabilities and the unified experience in early fiscal 2028, which starts in February 2027, and will announce pricing closer to general availability.

The partner slate

Salesforce and AWS put Salesforce data into Amazon Quick over MCP and opened Amazon Bedrock models to Agentforce, with Anthropic and NVIDIA models available now and OpenAI’s listed as coming soon. Salesforce and Google Cloud put an Agentforce Sales Agent for Gemini Enterprise into beta on Google Cloud Marketplace and set November for North American GA of Hyperforce on Google Cloud.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Benioff for a Tuesday session, yet the OpenAI deal Salesforce announced that week was a government one: a Missionforce partnership bringing OpenAI’s frontier models to Salesforce Government Cloud through Amazon Bedrock. For commercial sales teams, the OpenAI news from Dreamforce week came down to those Bedrock models in Agentforce.

What it will cost

The open question for a CRM your reps reach through other tools is the meter. Salesforce Ben reported on Sept. 24 that Salesforce will count each successful MCP or API call from an outside agent as a “Headless Platform Interaction” that consumes Flex Credits. Salesforce’s Aug. 31 rate card lists that rate as “TBA.” In a Sept. 17 help article, Salesforce says agentic usage is not metered yet, targets November for agent registration and the new billing model, and promises 30 days’ notice before metering begins. Sandboxes, scratch orgs, Developer Edition orgs and traditional API integrations are exempt.

Salesforce Ben noted that customers bringing tools such as Claude or ChatGPT into Salesforce already pay those providers, and neither its report nor Salesforce’s help article says whether Salesforce in Claude traffic counts. Anthropic’s setup guide limits the beta to orgs Salesforce approves that have “the latest Sales Cloud enterprise edition,” and on the Aug. 26 earnings call Benioff told analysts that customers who want Claudeforce need to move to a premium edition. The AIforce announcement says pricing and packaging are subject to change. Benioff also promised an “AIforce Max Edition that bundles everything into one product,” so get GA pricing in writing for anything you pilot.

The sticker prices moved first. On Sept. 3, two weeks before the keynote, Salesforce began selling three per-user editions with Flex Credits bundled in: Core at $195 a month with 500,000 credits, Advanced at $395 with 1 million and Max at $550 with 2.75 million. Each edition bundles Slack, Tableau Next and the Premier Success Plan.

Your admin’s configuration sets what Coworker costs. Users on Agentforce 1 Edition or Agentforce for Sales, Service and Industries licenses get seat-based Coworker, with no credits consumed for Slack or CRM search, once an admin assigns them the user-based AI permission. Without that permission they consume credits, as do Foundations users and guest, unauthenticated and portal users. Salesforce launched Flex Credits in May 2025 at $500 per 100,000, or 10 cents for a standard 20-credit action.

Ships now, pilot or roadmap

• Available now: Agentforce Coworker (GA), Slackforce Surfaces, Salesforce data in Amazon Quick over MCP, and Anthropic and NVIDIA models in Agentforce through Bedrock.
• Beta: Salesforce in Claude for orgs Salesforce approves, and the Agentforce Sales Agent for Gemini Enterprise on Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Pilot: Hunter (GA planned for November) and Koa (U.S. GA expected in winter 2026).
• Coming: live data in Slackforce Surfaces (rollout begins in October), Hyperforce on Google Cloud in North America (November), OpenAI models through Bedrock (coming soon) and Flex Credit metering for agent MCP and API calls (after 30 days’ notice).

Dreamforce Main Keynote 2026

The Dreamforce 2026 Keynote in Under 7 Minutes

The reaction

Salesforce makes the bull case with its own revenue line. Fulton Bank, an early Coworker customer, put a user count behind it.

In just weeks, we went from zero to more than 20 use cases live in production, supporting approximately 3,000 users across the organization.

The skeptics brought figures of their own. Salesforce Ben’s Mariel Domingo counted more than a dozen Salesforce acquisitions since the start of 2025 and put Agentforce adoption at around 12% of customers as of earlier this year. She wrote that Claudeforce pushes Agentforce “a bit into the back seat” and that the ROI conversation with customers is only starting now that Dreamforce is over.

On Sept. 16, the second day of Dreamforce, a global outage hit logins, APIs, workflows and support case creation across regions. Salesforce’s Trust site logs the disruption from 12:50 a.m. to 8:26 a.m. PDT. Requests had stalled waiting on an internal login service, and Salesforce validated a fix at 3:56 a.m., had a fleetwide rollout under way by 4:19 a.m. and declared the incident resolved at 11:59 a.m.

Salesforce in Claude and Slackforce reach your org through the same logins and APIs that failed on Sept. 16, and the metering report leaves open whether that traffic counts. Decide how much of your reps’ day moves into them before you sign the renewal.